


the empty space beneath

by BonesOfBirdWings



Category: A Memory Called Empire - Arkady Martine
Genre: Death, Gen, Imago machines, Lsel Culture, Musing on culture and death, Post-Canon, Teixcalaanli Culture, Unresolved, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 11:24:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20656448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BonesOfBirdWings/pseuds/BonesOfBirdWings
Summary: Death, and what comes after.





	the empty space beneath

When Yskandr was alive (embodied), he had dreamed. It was the sort of dream that everyone on Lsel has at one point or another, just on the border of sleep and wake.

He dreamt he was wandering the corridors of the station when the floor dropped out from beneath him. The void yawned under his feet. His tongue was fire and iron, the taste of the space between stars. Without the station’s gravity, he knew, there were no forces tugging on his body, but he still felt himself plummeting into an endless darkness.

He had jolted awake, like he had fallen straight into his sleep pod.

Death was like that dream, he thought, except there was no sleep pod to fall into, no body, no gravity, no jolt of wakefulness. Only the burning iron tang of the stars behind your teeth (behind your memory of having teeth) and a missed step into emptiness.  
  


* * *

  
Mahit doesn’t know what she’s doing back on Lsel. She had left in an impulsive flurry, some bone-deep (imago-deep) fear driving her return. A sense of something foundational to her slipping quickly (slowly, over twenty years) away from her.

Of course, there are good reasons to come back. The hurried, dangerous neurosurgery. The whispers of Lsel-based sabotage. But Mahit knows that neither of those are why she asked Nineteen Adze to return here, not really.

But while she’s here, she might as well deal with them.  
  


* * *

  
In Teixcalaan, it is said, these things are ceaseless: star-charts and disembarkments. This is because Teixcalaanli literature would have you believe that every embarkment is followed by a disembarkment, a narrative resolution, a full circle.

In Lsel Station, the people know that many things wait in the void. Pilots disappear, with only a last echo of a transmission to prove that they were ever there. There are Lsel graveyards on every mined asteroid, the location of the bodies unknown. The dead speak long after their tongues have been immolated (and then consumed). A voyage, in Lsel, is not a beginning and an end. It is a very long middle.

If you were to ask Yskandr what he loved about the Empire when he was alive (embodied), he would have told you many different things, depending when and where you asked him (poetry, art, Nineteen Adze, beauty, sunlight, Six Direction). If you asked him now, a ghost in a machine, he would tell you that he loves their concept of a conclusion, of everything coming to a natural and satisfactory end.

Lsel art is _suspended_. It is difficult to explain to a foreigner. The most famous Lsel poem, when translated into Teixcalaanli, goes something like this - 

Steel spear ships break like the dawn  
Against the horizon of the void.  
Drifting, limping, a cavalcade  
Of sweetened sorrow that coats my tongue like -  
Tomorrow I may consume what was  
Or it may consume me  
But today I must wait  
For -

In Teixcalaanli, it sounds unfinished, incomplete. Such is the impossibility of translation - in Stationer, with its suite of tenses and cases and grammar for the things that a planetary empire has no need to express, it sounds like the breathless moment before discovery. It sounds like a discordant jangle of notes, aching for a revelation.

But there will be no discovery, no revelation. When Mahit is asleep and Yskandr is alone in the cage of her skull, he wonders how Six Direction would have dealt with it, had his plan succeeded. Not well, he thinks. Teixcalaan does not prepare its people for life after death. Six Direction would be waiting for the end of the dream.

It would have never come, Yskandr knows, and thinks, alone, about spears and ships and the sun.  
  


* * *

  
“And the integration went well?” the psychotherapist asks Mahit. Her eyes are black and flinty, scraping against every twitch and flinch of Mahit’s body.

“We are balanced,” Mahit tells her. Both her and Yskandr are unsure of how much of a lie it is. “When - There was a time when it was… difficult… to untangle our grief, but I have heard that such a thing is common -”

The psychotherapist makes a note on her pad. Her movements are swift, sharp. Mahit thinks “knife’s edge” but the thought is too painful for Yskandr. She pushes it deliberately to the side.

The psychotherapist hands her a round candy, nondescript in its white plastic wrapper. “Eat it,” the psychotherapist orders, and Mahit obeys.

The candy tastes like her feelings lately, double-edged, in a state of flux. She asks what flavor it is.

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman tells her, her gaze intent and dark. “What matters it that Yskandr liked the flavor, but Mahit, it says in your file that you hate it. As the alive carrier of the imago line -”

“Embodied,” Mahit interrupts, Yskandr behind her words, and when the psychotherapist purses her lips, they both feel like they might have made a crucial mistake.  
  


* * *

  
Yskandr is aware that he is not, technically, Yskandr. That man is burnt to ash and kept in a box in Mahit’s quarters. He was killed by a man he trusted and a woman he loved. Right now, this Yskandr is an imprint of what Yskandr once was, a copy of neurons and synapses. 

When he had first arrived in the City (the Empire, the World), he had learned of the way they unnaturally preserved their dead, and he had briefly thought to himself that Teixcalaanli culture was closer to Lsel culture than either would think. Both refused to let go of the dead.

Mahit, he knew, only saw the differences, and in that, she was much wiser than him. It had been years before he had realized that Teixcalaan preserved its dead because it was terrified of what came after. (Lsel, as appropriate for a small station surrounded by a large void, was scared of the empty spaces that people leave behind.)

When he had been alive (real), he hadn’t been particularly frightened of either. He’d thought himself a bit above it all - a privileged position between civilizations that could see to the heart of both fears and know them for the fallacies they were.

Now, he’s terrified of them - of both what comes after and what does not.  
  


* * *

  
“What?” they ask, their lips numb.

“I’ve recommended that you be separated from your imago machine,” the psychotherapist repeats. Their last session with her had ended on a strange note, but neither Mahit nor Yskandr had expected this.

“With the eventual goal of reinstallation?” Mahit asks. Yskandr is stunned silent. There is some other emotion behind that, but Mahit doesn’t need whatever it is (paralyzing fear), so she ignores it.

The psychotherapist shakes her head. “Whatever occurred in your unsanctioned neurotherapy integrated you and Yskandr in a… well, for lack of a better term, a messy way. Or perhaps, had we tested for aptitude between you and a twenty-year old imago, instead of one fifteen years out of date, we would have rejected you as his successor. Or maybe this is due to the partly integrated Yskandr from your previous imago. The question is fascinating.” Her mouth quirked into a wry smile. “Someone will get a paper or two out of it.”

“But Yskandr will be removed before that,” Mahit confirmed. Her mouth tasted of fire and iron, like when she had dreamed once of plummeting from Lsel Station’s corridors into the void beneath.

“Perhaps,” her psychotherapist said. “As I said, I recommended it. I do believe that such a union is dangerous, unhealthy, and ill-advised - for both of you.”

Mahit remembers the terrible, dark, empty space of the broken imago. She thinks of the deep well of grief, nestled beneath her ribs. She feels like she’s falling, suspended, on the precipice of something.

“When will they decide?” she asks with the mouth that is not wholly her own.

The psychotherapist shrugs. “I’m sure they’ll inform you,” she replies, but there is doubt in her verb conjugation, in the twists of her grammar.

All in all, it’s a very Lsel statement.

“Thank you,” Mahit says, an end, a conclusion, a lie.  
  


* * *

  
The offer of imago machines had been a last-ditch, desperate attempt to save Lsel Station. He couldn’t call it his home - he had been away too long, settled on a distant planet until the memories of the station became hazy and dreamlike. But he was still loyal to it and its people, and didn’t want it to come to ruin. (He didn’t want to see the place where it used to be and think -)

He was aware that by offering the imago machines to Six Direction, he was betraying Lsel Station. He was also aware that he was betraying Teixcalaan. And that, most of all, he was betraying Six Direction.

And when he was dying, he had been glad, for a brief moment, that he wouldn’t _know_, that he wouldn’t _remember_, that he wouldn’t have to live with the weight of it all after his death. That this would be a clean end, a Teixcalaanli resolution.

But then Mahit had stuck him into her head, and suddenly he was Lsel again (alive again) - a steel spear ship carrying unknown and unwanted cargo. Hovering on the horizon of the void, caught between destruction and something even more devastating. 

He doesn’t know if he wants to be uninstalled or not.  
  


* * *

  
Mahit dreams that night.

She is falling through an endless darkness. On the back of her tongue is the iron of blood and burn of the sun. She is a spear - a weapon, a ship, a line of poetry sung in the streets. There are stars in her blood.

She waits to wake up, to jolt back into her body.

She falls, and she waits for -

**Author's Note:**

> First and foremost, this story is a love letter to A Memory Called Empire. And just like A Memory Called Empire was a work that echoed Teixcalaanli literature, I wanted this story to echo what I think could be Lsel art. I feel like the ever-present dead shape Lsel in more that just the ways we've seen. Or perhaps only a certain type of culture could be bold enough to make their dead ever-present. Either way, I just wanted to experiment with this world and see what came out.
> 
> I hope you liked it. Thank you for reading.


End file.
